Edward Thomas was not trained as a painter. He was a career soldier. But he painted pictures wherever he was stationed, including two years at Fort Snelling in Minnesota Territory from 1849 to 1851. Most of his pictures have been lost over time.

Today’s Minnesotans will easily recognize Fort Snelling. It still perches above the joining of the Mississippi and Minnesota Rivers to this day, now surrounded by busy freeways and airport runways. Historians can identify nearly all the other buildings pictured here. Among them are the U.S. Indian Agency building, the American Fur Company warehouse, and the home of trading agent Henry Sibley.

But of all the structures in the picture, the painter seems to have been most interested in the Dakota tipis in the foreground. He closely observed the patterns decorating the tipi covers. He carefully detailed the ends of the tent poles holding them up. The Dakota campsites, painted in the same browns and reds as the hills around them, become almost a part of the landscape itself. But unlike the stone fort in the distance, they would soon vanish from the scene. With the Treaty of Mendota, signed near this spot in 1851, the Dakota lost all but a thin strip of land further west along the Minnesota River.

Fort Snelling was completed only 25 years before Edward Thomas painted this picture. Dakota tipis, on the other hand, were not new to “Mdo-te,” or “the place where rivers meet.” An old Dakota story tells that the first humans came into the world from a cave near this spot. Dakota bands regularly gathered on the plain below the bluff for council meetings, celebrations, and ceremonies.

The confluence of the rivers became a good place for trade as well. Anishinabe Indians (also known as Chippewa or Ojibwe) traveled down the Mississippi from their hunting grounds to the north. In time white traders, mostly French and British, also appeared. They called the place Mendota.

By the early 1800s, this territory was part of the United States. The government wanted to protect the rich business of trade with the Indians for American trading companies. They also hoped to control conflicts between Indian groups, who frequently fought over dwindling hunting grounds. The bluff above the joining of the rivers was an ideal location for such an outpost. Fort Snelling was built on the first Indian land given up in the region of Minnesota.

Edward Thomas’s picture of Fort Snelling echoes the history of the place. Dakota tipis and American trading posts mingle near the river in the foreground. The fort, solid in the center of the picture, seems to hold the scene below in balance. But the buildings and green fields of permanent white settlement appear on its flanks and far into the distance.

The river marks a clear break between the fort on one side and Dakota life on the other. The picture describes not just the Mendota the painter saw before him, but the idea of “frontier” so vivid in the American imagination of the time. The crisp lines of the fort, wrote one local newspaper editor about the painting, showed “the freshness of our annexing Democracy.”

The scene would soon change. Within a year the Dakotas had to leave this land for small reservations elsewhere. Farms and cities multiplied faster than ever before. When Thomas painted his picture, not even four thousand non-Indians lived in Minnesota. By 1860, just ten years later, their population was 172,072. Any sense of balance between two ways of life suggested by this quiet painting was shattered forever.